Are you struggling to create a social media strategy for your business?

Lacking insight into the social behaviors of your customers?

No data, no problem!

Chances are your competitors have done all the hard work and all you need to do is look for it.

In this post, I’ll show you how to research the competition’s social game plan so you can build a solid social media strategy of your own.

Finding the Fundamentals

When it comes to social media marketing, you need to answer a few fundamental questions:

Should your business be on social media?

What networks should you choose?

How do you create a great profile?

What type of content should you post, and when should you post it?

Everyone must answer these questions, including business owners who want to create a strategy for their own business, marketing managers who need to convince their CEO to invest in social media and consultants who create strategies for clients in a wide variety of industries.

Fortunately, you can find answers through the process of competitor research.

Keep reading to discover how to get insight on your competitors.

#1: Comparing Audience Size

While you shouldn’t obsess about how many fans or followers your competitors have, noting these numbers at the beginning of your campaign can help you answer the following important questions.

Noting the number of fans your competitors have can help you answer a few important questions relevant to your own business. Image source: iStockPhoto

Are you planning to run a social media sweepstakes to make your business stand out this holiday season?

Do you need a guide to ensure that you don’t miss the crucial elements of a successful sweepstakes promotion?

Sweepstakes, contests and giveaways are increasingly popular among marketers who are vying for the attention of their social media audiences. Choosing a prize is the easy part.

Whether you run your promotion on Facebook or Pinterest, it’s easy to overlook something. Making sure you’ve got all your planning, technical and legal “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed is critical to your success.

In this article, you’ll learn the five steps of running a successful social media sweepstakes.

#1: Assess Sweepstakes Objectives

This is where most companies shortchange themselves. How? By focusing on superficial objectives that may not benefit their business.

For example, does it make sense to run a sweepstakes to increase your already-large fan base or do you want to jumpstart your social engagement process?

He always made an effort to develop personal relationships with his customers who trusted him with their cars.

The business grew to three locations by 2010, and Matt found it harder to maintain the small-shop feel. “When you have multiple stores and multiple managers, you can’t be everything to everybody,” he said.

Three years ago, he approached Stephanie Gutierrez, a long-time customer, about helping the business get started in social media.

By experimenting with different approaches, they hit upon a winning formula that promotes the personal connections Matt has always valued.

Google+ is designed to focus on one thing and one thing only: engagement.

So, how can you pump up your Google+ engagement?

In this post, you’ll discover six ways to use Google+ posts to stimulate activity.

#1: Make Your Text Stand Out

You’ll first want to help your content stand out by differentiating the formatting. Instead of publishing a boring block of text, add a little formatting variety to your next Google+ post.

Unlike Facebook, it’s generally acceptable to have longer posts on Google+. If you publish a long post, remember that dense text can be a turnoff for readers. Use appropriate line spacing and paragraph breaks to make it easy for readers to scan your content.

But as recently as three years ago, they had no cohesive voice on social media and no social media strategy.

The Giants were a traditional organization in a traditional sport. In 2010, when they brought in Bryan Srabian as social media director, they were getting information to fans by broadcasting. Typically this meant holding press conferences and sending out press releases or email blasts.

But then Srabian had an “Aha!” moment. He was reading a book by Chris Brogan and then had a conversation with him on Twitter. “We don’t really talk to our fans at all,” he thought. But they could.

It was time for a new model based on listening and responding. But first they had to find out what fans were saying, and where they were getting their information.

In this post, we’re going to look at how social media groups work for businesses and how you can benefit from them as both an owner and a participant.

#1: Google+ Communities

Let’s start with the newest kid on the block for social media groups: Google+ communities. When Google+ launched communities in December 2012, they grew at lightning speed. You can now find thousands of communities that cover every topic.

Benefits as a Member

One of the nice parts about Google+ communities is that you can participate in them using your personal profile or your business page—an option you won’t find on any other social network. This means that you can build your business’s authority on a particular topic within communities.

Do you ever wonder what tactics, tools and strategies other social media marketers are using?

Regardless of how long you’ve been involved in social media, chances are you have some questions that you’d like answered.

Questions such as, “What are the best social management tools?” or “What are the best ways to engage my audience with social media?”

These and many more questions were answered in the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which surveyed over 3000 marketers with the goal of understanding how they use social media to grow and promote their businesses.

Here are some interesting findings from the survey:

#1: Marketers Want Most to Learn About Blogging

When asked what social media platform they wanted most to master, 62% of marketers said blogging, putting it in first place slightly ahead of Google+. This answer is consistent with other studies, which show that the appetite for blogging education is growing.

An important trend to consider is that 28% of marketers now have mobile-optimized blogs. This is highly significant when you consider that the number of smartphone subscribers in the world has broken the 1 billion mark.

Blogging takes first place as the social media platform most marketers want to learn about.